As empires weaken or collapse, they either start wars to preserve themselves—or provoke wars through the chaos of their absence. The greater the empire’s role in shaping global or regional order, the more damaging its decline is likely to be—both for itself and for others.
Despite being on the frontlines of global strategic fault lines—wedged between a rising China, a declining Japan, a volatile North Korea, and an unpredictable U.S.—South Korean business schools have not moved to embrace geopolitics as a serious academic specialization within their institutions.
I’m reading acacdemic papers written about Korea from the 1950s. You can tell these papers would have been shared among colleagues, perhaps even discussed in closed-door seminars or cited in speeches. These academic papers mattered.
Read about Korea policy for more than ten minutes and you’re head explodes in a cloud of tedious talking points, over-technical documents, and dense strategy papers that have not changed for 30 years. If the goal is to craft better policy, then traditional methods are no longer enough. It is time to embrace a sharper tool: speculative fiction.
Every funded op-ed adds more distrust to the world of misinformation, disinformation, and post-truth society where scholars are less respected and repeated talking points more effective.
For years, critics have lamented the decline of the humanities, particularly within the framework of the corporate university.
In the peculiar realm of the North Korea Watcher, a curious phenomenon unfolds: a seemingly insatiable desire among watchers, commentators, and analysts to remind us, repeatedly, of their former positions in government, think tanks, and academia. It's as if proximity to power—even when that power produced failure—is a badge of honor. This ostentatious display of credentials is not just unseemly; it’s counterproductive, undermining the credibility of the very insights they purport to offer.
In the world of the North Korea Watcher, there is an abundance of variety. One particularly interesting group is the insight peddler - the consultancy services that seek to sell their wares. Of these, there are five broad groups who, just like itinerant peddlers of old, can be categorized according to the wares they’re selling - in this case, the level of analysis undertaken.
The impeachment of Yoon brought out a new academic phenomenon - the scholarly live report as academics compete with random commentators, acerbic trolls, and journalists for likes and reposts in a race to the bottom.
South Korea comes across as the darling of non-Korean academics. From scholarly articles to international conferences, South Korea’s political and diplomatic maneuvers are showered with glowing accolades. It’s as if every foreign academic is competing in an unspoken game of - Who can praise Seoul the most?
